A memoir

About the author

Meet the Author

Brooke Hemphill’s first professional writing gig was a regular feature in The Sydney Morning Herald titled Table for Eight. Each month, she took a group of singles out, got them drunk and set them up on dates. It was something her Bachelor of Visual and Performing Arts from The University of Melbourne/VCA did not prepare her for.

These illustrious beginnings led to hosting an online video series for Fairfax Media, sponsored by a herpes cream. Sexperts appeared on The SMH, The Age and The Brisbane Times websites. Each week the series explored a different topic related to sexual health, from bisexuality to whether sex can kill you - spoiler alert, it sure can.

Keeping with this theme, Brooke went on to write about sex, dating and relationships for a number of publications including Women’s HealthMagazine, Marie Claire USA and was momentarily the resident dating expert for Yahoo!7. For a long time her greatest claim to fame was a 3,000-word feature about masturbation that ran in Women’s Health, although her 90-year-old grandmother wasn’t terribly impressed stating, “there wasn’t anything in there I didn’t already know”. You can't please everybody.

Then Brooke got into video production, opting to move behind the camera. She made a couple of web series including a fly-on-the-wall documentary series called Generation L, in conjunction with production house Freehand. It followed an elite group of Sydney lesbians as they navigated the Mardi Gras party season. The 8 x 5-minute episode series has gained more than 250,000 views since it hit YouTube in 2011.

In an unexpected turn of events, around that time, Brooke was appointed the editor of Encore magazine, a 30-year-old Australian film and TV industry title which she edited for two years before its closure. She then foolishly took a job as associate editor of media and marketing magazine B&T. That ended in tears at the end of 2014.

Looking on the bright side, her first book, Lesbian for a Year, a memoir, was published by in Australia in 2014. The book charts her year of dating women and overall search for intimacy in relationships.

At the start of 2015, Brooke ventured out into the big bad world of freelancing and is currently hard at work for a range of advertising industry clients.

Despite all of this - or possibly because of it - Brooke aspires to write for television. She certainly watches a lot of it citing Girls, The Wire, Orange is the New Black, 30 Rock, Sex and the City, Rectify, True Detective and The Killing among her favourite shows.